Done Homeschooling, Looking Back: What Matters Most Over 25 Years of Home Education

What does homeschooling look like after the kids are grown — and what advice actually holds up over 25 years? This week, I bring back a favorite episode of mine to help remind me what's really important while taking this homeschooling journey. 

In this episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, I talk with Rosemary, a New Jersey mom of four who homeschooled all the way through high school and is now on the other side: kids launched, college decisions made, careers started, and the long view finally clear.

Rosemary shares the approach that shaped her homeschool—part structure, part freedom—with a few non-negotiables (like math facts and early reading), plus a powerful reminder: you’re replaceable at work… but irreplaceable in your child’s life.

You’ll also hear:

• Why agency is one of the biggest gifts homeschooling can give
• How she balanced academics + interests + sports as kids got older
• When and why she started testing (and what she learned)
• How her kids handled the culture shock of college environments
• A practical framework every family can use: Dojo • Cafeteria • Library
• A “well-kept secret” resource: Learning Unlimited (Saturday classes taught by graduate students)

If you’re new to homeschooling—or you’re deep in the weeds—this conversation will help you zoom out and build a homeschool that’s less about checklists and more about raising capable, grounded kids who know how to learn.

 🎹  Have your kiddos learn piano from this amazing resource, check out: Simply Piano. We love it!  🎶 

Cheryl's ebook: The Homeschool How To: Complete Starter Guide

🎁 Free resource: Grab my free 30-day homeschool quick start guide at thehomeschoolhowto.com

Transcript

Why I Chose Homeschooling

SPEAKER_01 0:02

I didn't plan to homeschool. I started asking hard questions, realized how little control parents actually have, and made the hard decision to leave a government job to homeschool my kids. Now I interview other homeschooling parents to learn how this all works. I'm Cheryl, and this is the Homeschool How to Podcast. Let's learn this together. Welcome with us today. I have Rosemary Labris from New Jersey. Welcome, Rosemary. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

I would like to start out by asking you just how many kids do you have and their age?

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Okay, so I um have four and I have been finished homeschooling now for a few years because my youngest is 20. So their ages are 20. I'm gonna try and get this right. Soon to be 24, 27, and 29. Oh, and they were all homeschooled. Yeah. It's so strange to be looking back, which is all I do these days, is look back on all those years. And they're now in relationships where they meet people who say, You were homeschooled? Oh, like just like you know, in elementary school, and they're like, Nope, all the way through, through high school. I went to college, but uh homeschooled the and people are always they're just so interested in like what was your life like? And I just I love hearing my adult, my young adult kids talk about their experiences because they're all extremely happy that they didn't go the traditional route. And it it was a blast. I had so much fun. It's very easy to find homeschoolers who are doing it, like they're currently in doing that wet work, right? And their kids are little and they're in the weeds, they're tired, there's so much going on. But it's hard to find people who are done with the job. And I mean, I have a career now, I've moved on in my life from doing a lot of things, but I'm totally finished with home education. And but I love to talk about it. And you just it's when I listen to other people talk about homeschooling, it's always people who are currently doing the job. It's never the ones who are done and are now in the next life, you know, grandparenting little ones or whatever. So yeah, I fall in that category.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Well, it's funny that you say that because the episode I released this past weekend, which by the time we released this one, it will have been a little bit back. I think episode 23 was with Deb Harris, and she is in the same realm as you, but we were talking about that and how there were not many people homeschooling back in the 80s and 90s when she was doing it with her kids and she had six kids and lived in Chicago, and now she is a data scientist, but you know, and it was hard for her to make ends meet with just the one income on a family with six kids. And she had talked about, you know, I would clean um house a house for a woman on the weekend just to have money for groceries, and then now here she is, you know, later in life, looking back on the fun that she had, the bonds that she had with her kids, and still do, and how deep those bonds are because of what the home education allowed them to have over the years. And she's just loving it. So that's so great to hear that this is more, you know, more common than not, right?

Career Tradeoffs And Being Irreplaceable

SPEAKER_00 2:58

It is, and you know, those years when you're raising children, whether you're homeschooling or not, but when you're raising kids, it goes by so quickly. Everyone says that. It sounds so trite, but it really does zip by. And I remember when my husband and I were first making the decision to homeschool. It was for the first year. Our oldest was going into kindergarten, and I said, I think I want to homeschool him. And he was like, Well, you know, it's kindergarten. Like, how badly can one mess up kindergarten, right? So go ahead and try that, you know? So we so I did. And it was wonderful. And we just did it one year at a time, and then it, you know, more kids came along, and the next thing I knew, they were going off to college. I mean, it really was like that. Like the next thing I realized, I was filling out college applications and I realized, well, my work is probably done. I'm very, very glad that I gave a quarter of a century to them. You know, if you have like a skill set, like let's say you're well organized, you're a good cook, you're you're whatever loving person, your kids should be the beneficiary of those skills. And I was working at the time, I had a career. I'd had my kids later in life. I have four, and I had them at ages 37, 40, 42, and 46. Really? Not the way most people do it. Not sure I would recommend it either. I had my career first. I was a manager at uh Price Waterhouse when I met my husband, and I wasn't planning to stop working, and I never even knew what home education was. And then, you know, we got married, and then we were expecting our first son, and around the seventh month, I thought, well, you know, I'm pretty good with like admin stuff and details. I'm pretty organized. I think I want to give that gift to my family, to my husband and my son. I didn't know I was gonna have three more, and I didn't know I was gonna homeschool. But those skills really, really carried me through those years. And I went back to work when I was done, and I literally picked up where I left off. And I thought, so many days I think to myself, yeah, I'm really glad I gave it to them because when you stop working, you are so replaceable. You are highly replaceable. I work at the children's hospital in a management position. If I left tomorrow, they are they'll find somebody to fill my shoes. I'm not foolish enough to think that I'm irreplaceable. But in my children's lives, I was irreplaceable. And so I'm really glad I gave them that time.

Agency, Culture, And School Systems

SPEAKER_01 5:08

I literally said that exact same thing in the Deb Harris podcast because I work in government right now. And like you, I had a my career, I've been there for 15 years. And you know, they especially in government work, it's you'll get this pension, this pension, this pension, and that's all you're focused on for the 30 years you're there is your promotions in order to get your pension. It's never a promotion because that's the work I want to do, and especially in government work, because it's all civil service exams. That's you never get the job that you like went to school for or have a passion in. It's I had this score on a test, and this was a job available, and I was the next in line, and that's the one I got. So for the last 15 years, I've been in a cubicle thinking of myself as a career woman. And for what? Because I got placed in positions because I happened to get a score on a test, and um, a lot of that's trained by society. I'm not needed there. I haven't been there since last August. I am sure they haven't. The government hasn't skipped a B. I'll tell you what. People are still getting their benefits, and I'm not missed. I'm completely replaceable. But I can't even leave my daughter with her grandparents for more than four hours. Mom, I want my mom. And that is just such a good feeling. And why are we? I mean, we were watching a show recently, my son and I, and they were talking about how walruses stay with their mom for three whole years. And I'm like, they expect mothers to give up their babies at six weeks and just go back to work.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

It's really I see it every day. I see it every day. I couldn't do it, but I also understand that some moms don't have a choice.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

There are single moms, there are moms who they just can't they can't not have that check. And if they're an essential worker, they have to show up, then it's daycare.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Yeah.

Teaching Approach: Drill And Delight

SPEAKER_00 6:58

And so, I mean, not everyone has the choice, but I really believe that every parent that can make it work financially should give it a try. That should try it. Just try it. You know, I was listening to the news and Kamala Harris was talking about artificial intelligence. So she was educating an audience that didn't need to be educated, by the way, on what artificial intelligence was. And I'm listening to her, and she went through it like very, very slowly, saying the machine learns from what you put into it. So what words you say, what ideas you have, that's what goes into the machine and that's what comes out. And that's why it's so important that we know what's going into artificial intelligence so that it's not racist and biased and prejudiced. And I thought she just perfectly described why parents want to homeschool their kids. Because little kids, their minds are the machines. And yes, we care very much what's going into the machine because we know it eventually comes out. So we'd like to have a say about what goes in, right? I wish that I could change the title of her speech to why you should home educate your kids.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yeah, and I bet that was them promoting some sorts of censorship. We have to censor and have censorship because of what goes in, comes out. Garbage in, garbage out. But that's exactly, yeah. You don't want your kid going to the government schools because garbage in, garbage out. We want them to be thing writers. So, what sort of approaches did you take with your kids? There's, I mean, right now, there's everything from the traditional like a Becca curriculum stuff to people that unschool, and that's a big thing now, where we just kind of go out in nature and we see a caterpillar and hey, let's go to the library and get all the books on caterpillars and watch videos on caterpillars and and then the life cycle and take it from there, or whatever's kind of tickling my kids' fancy. And I respect both of them, and they all, I'm sure, can work for so many different ways. So, what was your approach?

SATs, Reading Culture, And Screens

Ivy League, Service, And Balkans Path

Outsourcing Hard Sciences Creatively

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Well, it was a mix of both completely hands-off, letting them run crazy, and cracking the whip. There were things I did not relent on, and that had primarily to do with math facts, making sure that they knew their math facts, it was automatic, it wasn't a labored slow, let me try and think what nine times seven is kind of thing. It was a lot of drilling. Everything else was pretty chill. I made sure they knew how to read early on. I'm very blessed in that of the four of them, no one was dyslexic or had any kind of challenges learning to read, and they all learned to read very young. One was reading at two and a half, the others read between three age three and four. And we would go to the libraries, we belonged to like four or five different libraries. Every week we went a few times a week. We'd bring these big bags and I let them. They got to pick the book. So even if it was a picture book with three words in it, I never I didn't say anything. It was like okay. And then they would come home and it was like it was like Christmas. They would be so happy because they each had a giant bag of books and they would just sit and look at the books they wanted. They had a 15-minute reading lesson, and that I did not uh, you know, unless somebody was sick or really ornery, we did not skip that 15. They were able to read like level one, level two books by using that approach. Frankly, all the rest of the time of the day when they were in early elementary school, they were outside playing and we were going places. We traveled and did things. I never had them tested at all until they were like late middle school. Okay. Then I started to think about because they were bright, and I I at the time wanted them to get into the best colleges that they could get into. So I knew that eventually they were gonna have to take the SAT. And I didn't know, I mean, uh every mother who homeschools her kids knows if there's a deficit. I never met a mom who had a kid age 10 or 12. Maybe the kid struggled reading or struggled with math, that the mom was not aware. Mom is aware because it's painful to get it done when there's a problem. So I didn't have any sense that there were any problems, but I wanted to know how they were gonna do. So they started taking tests like seventh or eighth grade, and there were no issues at all. So, especially for the reading, because that was something that they always did voluntarily. They would sit and read paper books. I read a lot of paper books, so does my husband. So the behavior was modeled for them. Also, at least two, and I could argue three, were raised before the iPhones were so ubiquitous. Like the fourth one, iPhones were ubiquitous, and he stopped reading paper books at around sixth or seventh grade. He was too cool for that. He just wanted to play on the iPhone. I didn't have that issue with the other three because they didn't have smartphones. So I think that the era in which I was raising them was a little bit different. I do think it's harder today to get kids to sit down and read paper books. So, since we had as a goal for them to get into the best schools they could, we traveled, we visited colleges very young. Like starting in middle school, I drove all along the East Coast and we visited every top college just so they could see. Like, this is the goal. This is why I ask you to work hard, this is why I want you to do preparation for the SAT. Because since you're homeschooled, that kind of matters, that test, if you want to get into this school. Long story short, the first two did go to an Ivy League university. The third one got into Princeton, said no, went to the Naval Academy. And my fourth, who is an uneven landscape of skills, let's say, if JJ were here right now, he would say it himself. He's gifted in languages. He can learn languages like nobody's business. Wow. And he got a scholarship when he was in high school to study in Macedonia, tiny little country that borders on Bulgaria. He's now completely fluent in Macedonia, decided at the time he wanted to go to college in the Balkans because he thinks Balkan people are really cool. So he's actually in college at the American University in Bulgaria and loves it there. Says he's going to go back. Yes. So they're all fully launched. Everyone's out, everyone's kind of off on doing their thing. But in retrospect, because of the things that my first two were exposed to at University of Pennsylvania where they went to school, the shock that they were in with helicopter parenting from other students, like parents calling. Like they had different roommates over the years. Parents calling them, did you study for this test? What did you get on this quiz? So and so I I never asked them once what their grades were. I didn't even know until they told me what their grades are. I didn't hound them because I knew they were going to get good grades. I knew they were gonna study. I knew them as students, right? And it just the environment of Penn. The environment is to say it's woke, doesn't even scratch the surface. So there was a lot of stuff to resist every day for them. And while now they are participating in alumni events, for the first year or two, they didn't want to have anything to do with alumni events. They were like, no, I'm I survived it. My first one had a double major and graduated with honors. So he did really well. My daughter was a science major. She did well, but it was a lot harder for her because she was in, she had chosen a STEM topic at Penn. So she's she lives in Austin, he lives in New York, and one's in San Diego, and one's in Bulgaria. So my husband and I are getting ready to retire. It's like, where are we gonna live? It's like the Kansas. That's kind of like in the middle of everybody. If we pick a point on the map, that's that's in the middle, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Whoever has the most kids or has the first kid, that's where you go.

Do All Kids Need College

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Yeah, that's right, yes. But to go back to your question about teaching style and all that, I started out very organized. I had a list of everything that we were gonna do every day. I had my three-ring binders, I had my checklists, and it went pretty well until they got a little bit older, and they they definitely wanted to have more say over how they spent their time. And they were developing interests. You know, one was doing gymnastics. My sons all rode for a rowing club in South Jersey, so that's takes up a lot of time, and then they made a lot of friends through rowing, so they had a different emphasis. Like, okay, um, I'm gonna take this class at this community college, I'll do this one online. I need to be done by three, everything, because I need to get the rowing practice by three. And so they had different priorities as they got by the time they got to middle school. In a way, it got easier because all I had to do were was reverse engineer things into their schedules for all the hard math and all the hard science, all of it I farmed out to tutors or small learning groups or the local community college. Okay. I did not, except for biology, I did not attempt to teach any of those. I just don't know enough. Even if I could learn it temporarily, my knowledge would never have been fluent enough to, or fluid enough, to like answer a question that they might have had. I mean, I would I would say, like, wait, I gotta look that up. You miss the moment then. There's really um I believe in teachers, and I think that finding good teachers when you homeschool, you can actually find the best. You can you can you can find the best person who might even have access to a lab. We did that for physics. Um, it was an ex-physics teacher, and she had a lab in her house. It was fantastic. She was an outstanding teacher. I couldn't uh and you know, we shared, there were two other students, and so we shared the cost of a three-hour class once a week. Wow. So those are the kinds of creative um exactly things that you can do. You can do anything you want, depending on your budget. You can skin academically, more so now, frankly, than back then, because post-pandemic, there's so much more available online that I think that homeschoolers might drown in a sea of options more than when the options were fewer. Yeah. When I was doing it the online option.

Letting Go And Launching Teens

SPEAKER_01 16:26

So you for you to even connect with other families nearby that were homeschooling, it was harder to connect if you didn't have the internet to oh, hey, here's a Facebook group in our area. Let's go join them. And yeah, I would imagine certain parts, like you said, were easier because you didn't have to worry about them on an iPhone, but other parts were harder, like the connecting and seeing all that's available to you. Now, do you think college I was just talking to someone about this that college should that every career or that should be the goal, or are we kind of in I feel like we're kind of in a phase where the college is so expensive and you know, if we're like there are jobs that if we're working on this creativity in our children for, you know, the 13 years, do they do a lot of them need to go to college anymore?

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Yeah. I think the answer is no. Yeah. I think the answer is no. And if I had if I had that decision to do over again, I think my daughter would choose to go. I think all my sons would say, nah. I just would like to get to work. I'd like to start to find out what I want to do for a living because my oldest son is in finance. Now he was a philosophy and a Russian major. Really doesn't have anything to do with uh the work he's doing right now. His degree is very useful from Penn, but he himself would say you could have saved yourself a lot of money. My son, who's went to the Naval Academy, he studied English. He studied English at the Naval Academy, and it's like an engineering school, right? So you have He said that's one thing I'm really interested in.

Scholarships For Study Abroad

SPEAKER_01 17:50

You have your babies with you for, you know, the first 18 years. How do you handle sending them off? You know, sending your baby to kindergarten is anxious, you know, anxiety ridden. But you've had him with you for so long, and you're like, okay, here you go. How did you get through that?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

That was well, you'll find out by the time your son is 17 or 18, there's not much telling them what you want them to do or be. They have a good sense of it. With Andy, you know, I tried talking to him about other universities. He visited many other universities. He was the fastest lightweight rower in New Jersey in the year that he was applying to colleges, and he had almost perfect SAT scores. So he was recruited by every major university. He said, No, I want to serve my country. And I said, Why? No, we don't come from Peter and I are not military fam. We I didn't understand it. I really, really didn't know anybody who was in that life. I didn't know anything about the Naval Academy. He was absolutely certain that's what he wanted to do. He had what's called a blue and gold officer come to the house to sit with Peter and I and explain to us like what it was that Andy what he wanted to do. It's it's one of the most difficult things in the world to go through.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

He doesn't he doesn't give me a lot of details about what he goes through. He does talk to my husband about that. He knows I don't want to hear it because I actually want to sleep at night.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

You know, that's so hard.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

You know, we protect our kids for so long and give up so much to be close with them and then to send them off into like uh just just to have them drive a car is like scary enough. Like when they get their license and a vehicle.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

You know, all four of my kids traveled abroad when they were in high school. I applied for scholarships. I got really good at that. That was what I helped a lot of other students in New Jersey with getting scholarships to travel abroad. So starting for each of them starting at age 14 or 15, they went on the other side of the world for anywhere from one to six months. Now and I was not there.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Was that possible to a homeschool opportunity, or was that through a community college, like they were getting college credits for that?

Raising Agency And Social Confidence

SPEAKER_00 19:57

No, these are state-sponsored scholarships. They are open to school kids and they are open to homeschool kids. So the NSLIY scholarship, the AYLP scholarship, AFS has some scholarships, yes abroad, the Congress Bunkstad Scholarship. So basically, the state pays you, students, that is, to go and live in a foreign country. Usually it's a country where we've had some conflict, or it's a country with a high Muslim population. The goal, of course, is to have other countries see that American students and to be ambassadors for your country. But you go to school while you're there. Whatever grade you're in and whatever school they put you in, you go to school while you're there. Unless you're going over summer. So each of them had spent months away in another country where I really couldn't help them navigate the world at all. And I got better out of just from the practice at letting go. And I think that that helps a lot by the time your kids are ready to go to college. You do want to be able to let go. And they, I think my own kids would say, I'm not, I'm pretty good at letting go. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Do you think your kids will homeschool their children? Have you ever asked them?

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Yes, I do ask them that. Mm-hmm. The first three, John, Nora, and Andy, all say yes. They all say yes. They're very, very interested. Well, they see the difference between themselves and friends their age. Friends their age, especially females. My daughter, she sees a reticence, an anxiety, a nervousness, a fearfulness in her friends that she thinks is a carryover from all their school years, where if you're the first one to show up for a party, you're weird. There's something's wrong with you. Like, you know, and she's she's always the one that will go to the restaurant first and wait for her friends to get there. No one will walk in. Or she'll talk to the Major G saying, yeah, we're gonna have five more arriving, like we'll just wait here. Like they're fearful. Um, they lack agency. And I think that the greatest gift that you give a young homeschool student is the agency. They're in charge of their own days. They might not be when they're five, but by the time they're 15, they are in charge of their own days.

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SPEAKER_01 22:00

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SPEAKER_00 22:36

And their peers are being told when to stand up, when to sit down, when they can use the toilet. They're all looking at the same books, they're all taking the same tests, they're all wearing the same clothes, they get on the same bus, they get up at the same time, they get home at the same time. They are absolutely in lockstep. Talk about a way to rob someone of their agency. I think the greatest gift you can give to a homeschool kid is that. And I actually think have being on the other side of it now, and I saw this many times with homeschool families where they had a student with a special need. They had um a son or a daughter who simply could not learn to read, and they were struggling academically, so they had some kind of learning disability. Those kids whom I now know as young adults are the nicest, the most well-adjusted young people that you would meet anywhere. They look you in the eye, they'll shake your hand. They don't think there's anything wrong with them. They might not be, you know, on the uh star track, but they're gonna become managers at a fast food restaurant or a wawa or something like this. And they're good at their jobs because they have a sense of responsibility and haven't been then taught that there's something wrong with them. Yeah. I really feel that sometimes just not sending your kid to school, that alone is an advantage. Yeah. And then everything, anything you add on to that is like is like icing on the cake. But the real cake is that they're not in that environment.

Let Them Choose The Books

SPEAKER_01 23:55

Yeah, I agree. The more I look into it and like my reasons started out on episode one. I talked about the reasons that I want to homeschool and then the reasons I'm fearful to homeschool. And then just this week, I really thought about that list and expanded it now that I've talked to, you know, dozens of homeschooling families and really thought about the intricate intricacies of these reasons and expanded on them. And I I put a post on Instagram about it, and just from simple things like we had fire drills, but now they do shelter-in-place drills, and that's for school shootings. So kids are at young ages, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, getting this put into their mind that a peer or someone in the neighborhood might come in with a weapon and shoot them, and this is what they have to do, and that has to do something to the psyche, that alone, you know? Um, and not to mention what you think of guns and your trust for your peers or lack thereof trust in your peers because they could turn on you at any moment. Um, you know, that was one of them all the way into you know, the ideology of um the transgender and how I mean it's just it's getting pushed so much by the government that I can now I probably five, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would have, you know, yeah, let's go go to the parade and march for the people for equality. Now I see through that, if if the government is pushing this so much, there is an ulterior motive to that, just like the women's movement of the 60s, you know. So what I've come to realize, um, and I don't know if everybody would agree, but when you look at why China, just before they turned to a communist country, the government was pushing a genderless society. And when you remove the genders, you no longer have that physical attraction from a man to a woman. Well, then you're losing the marriage and the creation of a family, and you're losing the creation of a family bond. And then when you no longer have a family bond, or you don't ever have a family bond to live for, what's the purpose of living? Why are you living? Will you look to your government then for answers? Well, government, tell me my meaning. Tell me my purpose. Well, I'll tell you your purpose. Your purpose is to serve us and usher in communism or socialism, whatever you want to call it. And that makes so much sense. And you mentioned before about how your kids, when they graduated from college, they got through the wokeness and didn't even want to be part of the alumni events for a couple of years. Was that even a conscious thing as you were raising your kids to teach them about, you know, I don't know, you know, your religion or or your political values, but you obviously they came out knowing something different than what's being pushed in school today. Was it a conscious decision on your part? And did they have to were you afraid that they might meld with the crowd once they went into school?

Weekend University Programs

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Um, the answer to that question is yes, I was. I definitely was, but I knew that they were going to go to college. And I knew that like 99% of college campuses are extremely liberal. I wasn't so concerned about my oldest son when he went off because his ideas about the world were so well formed. He chose to study philosophy because he read very, very deeply and um has a you know well-established kind of doctrine in his own mind. And he's also very calm, so I knew he wasn't gonna get triggered. He would be and he would be able to hold his own. So he got through all that and just found it a little bit disgusting at how overwhelming the pressure is to conform. My daughter, I think, suede. She was a little bit, um, I don't know what the right word is, but uh a little shaky. And I remember she was in her junior year when Donald Trump was elected president, and she started texting me saying the school, I mean, University of Pennsylvania, actually brought little puppy dogs in to have the students sit with little puppy dogs in order to calm them down because the students were hysterical because they thought since Donald Trump had been elected president that the world was going to end. I mean, and I said to my daughter, I said, Let me ask you something. Do your friends know anyone who might know someone who might know someone who might have voted for Donald Trump? She said, No. I said, but what does that tell you about their lives? How could they be so isolated that they don't even know someone who knows someone who knows someone who voted? How could they be so separated, so many degrees of separation from what ended up being, what was the 70 million people who voted for the man? How could they not know a single one? Like that doesn't make sense. And it tells you something about their world.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Now that you're at the other end of the spectrum from a lot of moms that just kind of woke up during COVID and are now like, I gotta homeschool my kid, I can't send them to public school. What advice would you have for us?

Parting Wisdom And Closing CTA

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Well, a couple of things. What kids really want the most, what they want more than anything in the world is our time, right? And that's the thing that's hardest to give them is that like time. I think that the first decision a homeschooling parent has to make in order to become successful at the job is that decision. You're gonna give them your time. So that means you're not gonna do all the things you want to do. You can always carve out, and I always carved out a little bit of time for myself at the end of the day where I would exercise and have like my own like a little treat and a cup of decaf, and then okay, fine, so I I had time for myself, but everything else during the day, it was about them and it was for them. So, with that as a backdrop, I think that taking them places, traveling, I think you know, if you to focus on a curriculum and to check boxes all day is a mistake. You want them to come out in the world not not thinking like inside of a box. You want them thinking outside of a box all the time. So I wouldn't give them books that come in a box and have you working like within that box. I would take them places to museums and spend time talking about ideas. And wherever you go, just to be asking, well, I wonder why the people here do this. Why do you think that it evolved that way? To be engaged with them in conversation. I mean, uh there were times I would lose my voice because we were talking. My kids and I were talking so much about, you know, something we saw at a science museum or an art museum. We did a lot of museums. I mean, at least once a week we went to a museum before they all started into their sports and stuff like that. Teaching them basic skills, cooking. I had this theory that a good homeschool has three parts to it. It's one third dojo, one-third cafeteria, and one third library. So to go back to that, like the dojo is it doesn't matter whether you live in a city or a country, but it's just making sure that they have plenty of time. Play. Unstructured play. Where you know you don't sit down in front of the Legos and like you got 30 minutes, quick, put together your Legos because then we gotta leave. But just unstructured time for them to do what they want, make a mess inside, outside, and taking physical risks, you know, jumping from one thing to another, maybe falling down and scraping your knee. It doesn't matter. So the idea of dojo is that for them to reach their physical potential, they have to do a lot of stuff without a lot of supervision. So you have to figure a way to get that in there, and it can be inside the house or outside the house. The cafeteria, that's that's the kitchen. And I really am pretty serious about nutrition and making sure that they're not eating fast food. One of the greatest advantages that you have as a homeschooler is that you can provide home cooked meals. It's way better than processed meals. And so once they learn how to do it themselves, you know, the old Bible verse, rather than like give them a fish, teach them how to fish, they invested time teaching them how to make the things they really liked. They like making pancakes from scratch. I'm gonna show you how to do it. Here, so you know, just these ingredients are the only ones you need. Now make yourself some pancakes. And they had all different cafes. They used to make up cafes, they would make up little menus, and they would make me buy a cookie off the menu from them. They could spend an entire afternoon doing something like that. So the kitchen was a hub, and I taught them to cook, and I did a lot of cooking. And they they came to like like real food, and they eat real food, they eat meat and potatoes and vegetables, and they know how to bake cakes and things like that. So I think that the dojo, the cafeteria, and then the library. It's just to fill your house with interesting books and not to have fights with them over what they want to read. I learned this early. My oldest son, when he was about six, got into these books called Secrets of the Drune. I hated it. It was sci-fi and it to me it was junk reading. Of course, the library had like 50 of them, and he wanted to read every one of them. And I just like zipped it up and said, Okay, secrets of the drone, it is. And he read every single one of those. He became such an enthusiastic reader because I let him choose what he wanted to do. So I think um having books lay laying around everywhere. A lot of times families will over the years have asked me to come to their house because they want to talk to me because their kids won't read. My kids won't read. I don't know why my kids won't read. And I look around the house and I don't see any books. I said, Well, where are all your books? Do you read? And they're like, No, no, my husband and I, we don't read. I said, Well, you know, try try setting up a reading hour where all the devices get turned off, but let them read what they want. If it's Ripley's believe it or not book, so what? It just let them give them some some choice in this realm. So the dojo, the cafeteria, the library. I think that that it just hits the three main realms of healthful living. If you're reading well and you're eating well and you're moving around, then all the other stuff is gonna get filled in. It doesn't take long to sign up for, you know, a little chemistry class or or something. You know, they'll get all that other stuff. And frankly, half of it they don't need. They're not going to college, most of it they don't need, but they do need how to read, know how to read critically. And you know, I think that's it it's important to emphasize that. So I don't know if I answered your question or not. Oh, absolutely. But I have a suggestion. I have a suggestion. You're probably aware of this, but I didn't become aware of this this company until 20, I think. It's called Learning Unlimited. Okay. So it's a nonprofit organization that organizes graduate students in universities all over the country to teach classes on Saturdays to kids on any subject under the sun. So the classes might be like the chemistry of chocolate brownies or the Latin in Harry Potter, how to make a lollipop, fossils. It could be some extreme topic in math or geometry. They tend to be fairly arcane, but they're broken down into a small piece and made like intellectually available to like middle school age kids, and they're cheap. You sign up and it's like$30 for the day, and your student, your kid might go to four or five different classes. Oh wow. And they're all it's all over the country. It's primarily the East Coast. Okay. Most of the schools on the East Coast have, I mean, there's one Columbia, MIT. I mean, all the major universities, and also some just like regular universities. And they're springing up everywhere. And when we first went, we did a two-day learning thing at MIT. And I took three of my kids, my oldest was in college by then, and they said, unbelievable, we finally feel like we're around our people. Like these are kids who really are interested in learning. They will not let parents pick out the classes. The kids pick out the classes. You don't have to take notes. There is no test. And if you're not interested in paying attention, they just kindly ask you to go and sit in the back of the room and just don't make noise. So they don't care if you don't learn anything. They just want the kids who are really interested in learning to be able to ask questions and they just talk. It was wonderful. We went to as many as we could in a year, and I never stopped going. And they even have special weekends that they have things like at Yale, they have one where it's three or four weekends in a row on a particular topic. So you can actually get to know the other kids in the class and actually get some good learning in. They'll take you to the Peabody Museum and you'll learn about every single thing that's there. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that makes learning exciting.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Not dull. You know, when you're sitting at the table, kitchen table with a workbook, like it's as dull as death, right? So I would say do as many things like that as you can. But you see, it does all begin with giving them your time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes. And you said it was called Learning Unlimited. Learning Unlimited. Learning Unlimited. Okay, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

It's just a wonderful organization. And like I said, there are programs going on all the time all over the country. They just started back up last year. Of course, they had to give it up over COVID. It was all online during the COVID years, but that's just not the same as being there and seeing other kids with whom you feel sympathetico because you know they also gave up their Saturday to come and learn about rocks and minerals or or whatever the topic is, you know?

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Yeah, and that's what I've loved about this podcast is like just learning all the different things. Like I hadn't heard of this one yet, and you know, there I always write down the resources and put them in the show notes so that people can go back and you know look at it and have a link to go to in case they are driving and missed it. But I mean, stuff like that is amazing. And who knows, who knew that it was even, you know, that it exists. Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

It's a well-kept secret. I don't understand it. The MIT one is now so popular, theirs is the largest, that it's a lottery system. When it first opens, you quickly apply and then they'll let you know if you got in or not. There are up to like kids just pouring into the classrooms, and the students, I have to say, do a fantastic job. I now volunteered to go and talk to parents at these events because lots of times parents stay around. They don't want to leave, like, say, a 12-year-old. They're not going to go home and leave the 12-year-old with because these kids also have to figure out how to get around campus because they're not all the classes in the same room. So, since the parents tend to hang around, they look for something, some programming for the parents. So I had volunteered many times to talk to anybody who wants to hear more about homeschooling, and usually the room fills up and I talk until I don't have a voice.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Oh, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Not hard to imagine, huh?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

No, that's amazing. I'm sure you're a wealth of knowledge and so helpful to these families. Rosemary, thank you so much for being with us today. This has been so wonderful to hear and so heartwarming and so nice to see that you know, four children grown, and I always love hearing will they homeschool their kids? Because then you kind of really know. Like, did they appreciate it and do they want to provide this for their kids? So, congratulations to you. Women, we can have it all, just maybe not all at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

Indeed, that is true. True words were never spoken. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Well, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure. Same here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the Homeschool How To Podcast. If today's episode helped you, please be sure to follow the show and leave a review. It's the best way to support the podcast. And if you're just getting started or need a reset, head to thehomeschoolhow2.com and grab my free 30-day homeschool quick start guide. Until next time, keep learning, keep questioning, and thank you for your love of the next generation.